December 16, 2015

UPDATED 2016-08-14: We found the source of the issue to be a bug in Supermicro BIOS C-State. This discussion explains more: Serverfault BSOD Hyper-V VM. Supermicro as of today hasn’t released a BIOS update even though they’ve confirmed the problem.

To summarize, the solution is in the Advanced Power Management of the BIOS, set the BIOS power management to the following:

CPU C State Control:

We just added new supermicro servers based on the new motherbaord X10DRT-PT and SYS-2028TP Servers , started testing it out, doing what we all techies do, try to make it work!

To our surprise, when we tried to install CentOS 7 or 6.7 x64 on the server, it failed with constant reboot problem when CentOS setup loads.

Well, a brand new system, what could be wrong? Pulled up MemTest86+ and the RAM checked out OK. Perhaps Disk issue? Tried different disks and all is ok.

The only thing left is BIOS issue. Sure enough, it turned out that for a strange reason CentOS does not play well with some of the “Energy Efficiency” options in the BIOS CPU Menu.

Once we’ve disabled the energy efficiency options, the system ran like a rabbit in a field! Moral of the story, check the BIOS for ACPI or energy options that may hinder performance or even cause issues.

In fact, often times we do disable power-saving options because we believe they cause more trouble than desired.